The best pots for the best pickups

[Ratae Corieltauvorum]

Pickup makers, there are Bourns, cryo'd CTS etc for straight audio taper and linear pots, but who makes the Rolls Royce of push/pull pots for splitting the sweeet humbuckers from Lollar, Throbak, BG Pups etc?

[Steve Conner]

I don't know if anyone makes premium push-pull pots. Even PRS have to use the ordinary Alpha ones.

Having said that, the push-pull pot on my PRS has never caused any trouble, and I use it at least once per song.

[Mark Hammer]

I'm not sure what you consider to be "Rolls-Royce" quality. Is it feel you're after? switch life?

[Ratae Corieltauvorum]

I'm not sure what you consider to be "Rolls-Royce" quality. Is it feel you're after? switch life?

Accuracy, taper, feel and life

[David Schwab]

I use Bourns pots myself.

[Ratae Corieltauvorum]

I use Bourns pots myself.

I saw on your site, do they do any push/pulls?

[Mike Sulzer]

I think that CTS pots are fragile. It takes very little force to twist the case loose from the shaft housing.
Alpha pots are better.
Bournes are very well made. They have, or at least they used to, a few products designed for use in guitars, premium pots that are a joy to have. But they do not have everything that you might want.

[Mark Hammer]

It is worth pointing out that in some cases you may have no choice to make. For example, if one is simply mounting pots to a pickguard, there are more choices available than if one is installing pots in a Les Paul or other guitar where long shafts are required to extend from inside the control cavity to the outside.

As for lifespan, just how much do you twiddle your pots? Most will last until you are old and grey (or buried if you are already old and grey). Though they may have functionally infinite lifespan, they CAN vary in how easily they get gunked up. The gunk is not just stuff from the outside. You can have a hermetically sealed pot and it still gets dirty, because the wiper is forced into contact with the resistive strip, and erodes the resistive strip over time, like the gravel from the top of smooth asphalt coming loose as the cars repeatedly pass over it. Some wipers tend to scrape more than glide. I find that the wider the diameter of the pot, the greater the likelihood that the wiper makes a gentler contact.

As for taper or accuracy, there is NO guarantee that any given pot will conform tightly to the taper it is spec'd for (ALL parts have tolerances), or that evenif it does the taper standard it adheres to is right for YOU. The optimum taper is the one that works for you in your context. If you're the sort that tends to leave the pots up full 98% of the time, who gives a rat's ass what the taper is? A 500k pot up full is a 500k load whether it is linear, log, reverse log, log/anti-log, or something else. If you dicker with your pots, then the optimum taper is dependent on HOW you dicker with them. I can imagine some guys whose style would warrant use of anti-log, rather than the more traditional log.

[David Schwab]

I saw on your site, do they do any push/pulls?

Yep. I have those also:

[Guitarist]

Check out CE Distro. they've got brands to choose from.

If you need a special type, I recall Main Electronics of Vancouver, BC saying they could build custom pots. Those old hams in there are hard-core.

I myself hate pots that go dark on 7 or 8, so settle on 250k without a treble-bleed cap, but that's another issue.

[Jim Shine]

CTS pots have primarily been imported the past 20 or so years.

I don't use built in switches, but my all time favorites have been old Stackpoles and Clarostats. Both hold up well and I like the tapers. Bourns and Allen Bradley make great modern day pots". Centralab's have seemed to slightly drop in quality over the past 5 or six years. They seem better than CTS, but not by much.

[David King]

Mouser sells the Bourns 17mm w push/pull is a variety of configs. Allparts sells them as well.
Bourns - Resistor Kits

Precision Electronic Components in Toronto is the only "domestic" manufacturer left. They make the Alesandro pots along with nice 27mm mil-spec pots but I don't think they have any with switches. Check Mouser and Digi-key if you are interested.

[FunkyKikuchiyo]

CTS makes pots to order for major suppliers, so a CTS pot from Fender, from AllParts and from Stew Mac will all be a bit different. In my own experience they are usually very robust, and the biggest problem with them for people has been the taper (especially on the All Parts pots) and that they can feel pretty darn stiff. The Stew Mac version is relatively new to the market, and it seems they've made a design with the normal list of complaints kept in mind, and I've been curious to try them.

I haven't found a single brand that I really like. There are some crazy high end pots out there and I'm sure they are worth every penny, but there is a point of diminishing returns in these applications.

For push/pull, I've done okay with the typical lot hanging around out there from the normal guitar parts suppliers. Any push/pull pot is going to be a bit more frail than a standard pot and there really isn't any getting around that. They do take a good beating, and the only times I've really had problems is in trying to get a knob off and ultimately yanking the whole shaft right out. If you don't need to remove the knob regularly, then you should be okay.

If you're worried about sound differences, then the best thing is just to check actual value versus spec value. Being off spec isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it can change your sound.

[Mike Sulzer]

The Stew Mac version is relatively new to the market, and it seems they've made a design with the normal list of complaints kept in mind, and I've been curious to try them.

The CTS pots from SewMac are mechanically fragile. I suspecct that you will find that they are all like this no matter where you buy them from when this cheaper version propagates thorugh the system.

[FunkyKikuchiyo]

The CTS pots from SewMac are mechanically fragile. I suspecct that you will find that they are all like this no matter where you buy them from when this cheaper version propagates thorugh the system.

Are you sure you're thinking of CTS? I've replaced hundreds of pots on guitars, and probably fewer than 10 or maybe 20 of them were CTS pots that had failed, and even those tended to have extreme reasons for failing. I've had other beefs with CTS, but durability has never been one of them.